Quarantine
by Cassend
Summary: Cowrite- Thelexhex vs AliasBlackClaw; It was a dark and stormy night, and two authors decided to put Jill through hell, you know, again, but with more worms.


_**ABC VS THELEXHEX**_

_**(GO READ HER STUFF.)  
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_**we had fun, we're awesomely exhausted, proud to present this oneshot for October-y people. spookyyyy. Please eat noodles while reading this.  
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_**Quarantine**_

**-AliasBlackclaw & thelexhex-**

**Holla'**

-v-**  
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_Jill sat rigid on the small exam table, fists clenched tightly. _

_She despised being here: The logical part of her knew that it was for the best - that she had reached the point where triple antibiotic ointment and a bandage were no longer sufficient for the malady that graced the back of her calf. The other part of her, however, felt an irrational urge to say, "Fuck it," and escape from this place via the large window behind her. She took a deep breath and decided that:_

_A) Escape was not an option, and _

_B) She hated Chris for making her come here in the first place._

_She resolved to punch him in the throat or the stomach as soon as she was free to go, though something primeval in her entertained the thoughts of tearing off entire body parts as well. She hated the entire miasma of an official medical situation. Being who she was, she was prone to examination and routine checkups, and she loathed every minute of it. The sterile white rooms, the latex gloves and smells of antiseptic and overly strong hand sanitizers were things that made her take a few moments to swallow something irrational down, dry._

_Or perhaps not so irrational- a phobia of scalpels and the people holding them, ending up on a slab somewhere, poked and prodded for remnants of Nemesis. One doctor was fine, one medical professional to give her the regular inoculations, the completely invasive physical examinations coupled with psychological evaluations. Personally, and she might've been being too self-critical, she believed she wasn't up to par with either aspect._

_There was a light tap on the door and an extremely chipper looking man poked his head in. Plain looking: mustache, glasses, balding. Looked like a doctor- smelled like a doctor, sounded flat and mandatorily peppy like a doctor. His eyes looked a bit like bulbs - big black bulbs that were rather hard to interpret, and thus made her nervous. It was like staring into the glassy eyes of a spider. _

_He introduced himself - something generic, commonplace - and sat down in the rolling chair across from the table. He was happy – too happy: it made Jill feel even more uncomfortable in the small space than she already was. After a series of run-of-the-mill questions the doctor donned a pair of latex gloves and began his examination. There was a stethoscope to her chest before he asked her something - standard procedure. Jill kept her calm, as only Jill seemed to be able to._

_And then he got to the thick of the problem and Jill couldn't keep the poker face anymore. She didn't trust this man whose big black eyes refracted off the fat lenses of his glasses. He touched her and her instinct was to kick him. Something about him was off, she swore it._

_Though it could've also just been her fever playing tricks on her head right now. Infection, fever, nausea, aches._

_For obvious reasons she had to maintain a clean bill of health._

_The wound was quite an impressive hulk: a large, discolored lump the diameter of a quarter stood out against skin in a bloom of rot-colored bruises. Her nails, bitten to the bone, had cut off the topmost layer of the odd sore with her scratching, allowing a slight discharge to solidify around the edges, framing a festering mess. The lovely look was polished off by bright red streaks radiating from the area like little vines. It was definitely at this point - the point of looking like she had been shot in the leg- that Chris got involved._

_There was an awkward pause as the happy doctor's smile was replaced by a look of awe-struck horror, and his rolling eyes seemed to swell. After some poking, prodding, and more questions, it was determined that it must have been some kind of bug bite that had become infected over time. _

_And then he informed Jill that he was going to have to lance it. _

_She was never the type of person to become hysterical for any reason; after all, she had managed to stay remarkably calm even while faced with hordes of the undead, but this was different: The quiet atmosphere, the bright lights, the cheery colors on the wall, the ticking clock that seemed much too loud, the incredibly happy and good-natured doctor that seemed to want to help as opposed to mull over her remarkable recovery from T-virus infection… _

_She raised her withered nails to her lips to gnaw at the emaciated stubs out of nervous habit, a million and one of her personal demons effectively blocking out everything the bespectacled man was saying to her. The feel of cold antiseptic on her skin brought her back to the present, a sense of dread sweeping over her as the pseudo-surgeon gathered his tools. _

_The second the disposable scalpel was unsheathed, something inside of her snapped: she shrunk back against the wall and refused to let the physician anywhere near her. She screamed; she knew she was overreacting, but she couldn't help it: she didn't want to be there, to be scrutinized, cut open, and silently judged for her aversion to medical facilities by people who would never understand the things she had seen. They'd take her and slice her up- lift out her organs and cap them in jars. Just like that she had been isolated from society._

_She jumped off the table and backed against the wall, cornered, sweating. _

_A nurse was called in to help calm her down, and when that failed, Chris was ushered in from the waiting room to restrain her. She yelled various slurs at her incredulous colleague, fighting him and the nurse to the best of her ability in the cramped space. That she had been trained to fight was problematic for everyone involved_

…_Because she was __**very**__ good at it._

_A single moment of hesitation provided Chris with the opening he needed: he positioned himself behind her and pinned her arms; it took two nurses to hold her legs in place, and the doctor swooped in with the scalpel. He quickly made the small incision before squeezing thick, yellowish pus from the site. Chris swore and made a comparison to squeezing toothpaste out of a near-empty tube, agitating Jill even more than anybody in the room thought possible. She watched as crimson began to mingle with the remnants of the pus: dark, warm, contaminated. _

_As the medical staff worked to staunch the blood flow and bandage the sore, she resolved to punch Chris in the throat __**and**__ the stomach when she got out of this, but before she could entertain the thought of bodily harm, the world was spinning and she was draped over the medical table._

_-v-_

_**Quarantine**__- Isolation/detention period following suspect of an infectious agent. Originally 40 days long._

A pale individual sat in the mostly empty bubble of a room, thin hands folded, head drooped. In total she had been here for twelve hours. The only thing diseased about her at first glance was her eyes. They kept her here as a precaution, to poke and prod- to make sure they weren't going to have the next global pandemic due to minor oversights. To make sure there were no monsters under her skin. It was the irony of the blanched room containing an equally blanched woman: There were so many monsters they couldn't see under a microscope, swimming around her out of sight.

She took in her surroundings for what must have been the ten-thousandth time since being placed into the small antechamber. There wasn't much to see: the room was that sort of white that was suffocating, illuminated by harsh lighting that wreaked havoc on her sight. Plague eyes under ultraviolet lights could do nothing to prevent being scalded: Cinching them shut did absolutely nothing- they already watered and ached.

The room was still bathed in purple glow on white walls after yet another look around.

It wasn't the first cell she had been privy to: four walls and a door were typical accommodations - the norm. She had the lackluster of a prisoner, the psyche of an invalid, the body of a weapon. Fingers like ribbons and eyes like a mannequin. Carried around from door to door, like a doll, like a dog.

"Go to sleep." She told herself, words that sounded simple accompanied by her back in the mattress, her head on the pillow. Her body overcomplicated things. It _always_ overcomplicated things. She raised her hands to cover her face, wishing that her ears weren't so sensitive to every little sound: the whirring of the air scrubbers made her want to plug them. Sticking her fingers in her ears might have made her look childish, but at least the noise would be muted. Nevertheless, she didn't do it for the sole purpose of hiding in the darkness under her hands.

As she lay there the laminated band on her wrist settled tight on her skin, creating an irritating itch. She opened her eyes very slightly, squinting at the small black words that stood out against shiny plastic. Heavy lids, heavy head, her ribbon-bone fingers drooped under the bracelet.

_Valentine, Jill_

_F_

_Admission date: 03/08/2009_

As if she was a patient, but she was quite the opposite. She was a germ, a microbe shriveling away. She had always been pale, but now she was unnaturally so. The contours of her face became hard and cruelly aged, her body was a bundle of diseased and poised muscle, wasting away, eating itself out of withdrawal.

_Symptoms- migraines, muscle tremors, nausea, anxiety. Paranoia in fits. Aggression. Insomnia. Delirium. _

_ The clipboard felt cold in her hands, plucked from the top of the specimen containment unit welded into the wall. The freezer wasn't her first choice for experimental studies, but it sure as hell did a fine job of containing the subject. Frost dripped off the shivering woman behind thick panels of glass, ice clung to her skin, patterning it. _

_ Excella Gionne pursed her lips until they cracked from the temperature, her bones numb. Detoxing from P30 was unpredictable, warranting this study; warranting measures that were cruel to observe the body's reactions to the already steep effects._

_ And the effects were disturbing enough._

_ The harsh lights refracted off glass and metal walls, the floors made of steel were so cold they stuck to skin._

_Subject 0084-6237__ screamed something unintelligible - something too fast to understand, too slurred; clinging to the blanket around her, she shrieked and scooted from one side of the room to the other like some skittish arachnid. The room swallowed sounds alive, muted them, as the temperature control unit buzzed continuously in the background._

_ "Hallucinations." Excella commented, told to no one and to the notepad of paper, wet with melted frost. "Jill, Jill, Jill…"_

_A haughty remark was on the tip of her tongue; something was there but she couldn't seem to say it. Between her and Jill stood the thin glass wall, separation so poetic between ascribed aristocracy and all the rot of human kind, something so mutilated and wretched- it wasn't worthy of such degrading commentary._

_ Secretly she admitted the border was a very fine line between the two- the glass was too thin, but at least she was on this side of it. Excella pressed her sharp tongue to the back of her teeth, and sighed, a stream of frozen breath and dead words._

_ Jill's body heaved with the stagnant shivers of withdrawal. She pressed to the frozen walls, burning alive with a fever that nothing seemed to be able to cure. Her cheeks were a shade of scarlet red, lips coated with burst sores, eyelids so chapped they were bleeding on the undersides._

_ Days of sobriety had turned her into a pathetic mess: She was a screaming, shaking invalid. Her bones felt like they were going to burst right through her skin- they were too tightly pushed against it. Wesker didn't calm her fever with anything – not even an explanation. _

_ Perhaps revenge, perhaps a touch of sadism._

_ Excella took her to the freezer when her body temperature threatened to go into dangerous territory, possibly even kill her. An act of pity._

_ And god, she was pitiful. _

_ 'Hallucinations.' She wrote each individual letter with a gentle slant. It was one word on an empty page that meant so many things. Jill's eyes were wide, glazed, bloodshot, and they saw a world that didn't make logical sense. She wasn't a friend: she was a threat, a subdued threat…_

_ It rang true even when the sick woman started mumbling something- oddly enough coherent. Excella tried not to think of it when the mumbling turned to fever-induced tears and quick words begging for something._

_ "Can't you let me die?"_

_ The phrase was written down with quick scratches of her pen. Excella felt the frown despite herself. It was so much more personal in a one on one situation- the words were stronger: she was too close to remove herself from the situation._

_ Looking at this with an impartial attitude was something difficult, but she was a scientist._

_ "What do you see, Jill?"_

_ Jill stared into space. Excella repeated the question, sighing it through her teeth. _

_ The woman's head lolled to the side. Wheezing through her ribs she said something- answers reflected in sounds- yelps, a mantra of, "No- no- no-no…" Jill stared, unable to look away from the visage: A man stood over her, skin scarred and cut open- she'd seen him before around the village. Tall, dark skinned, muscles ripped with disfigurement and gashes that oozed pus and blood._

_ "No…no…no… don't… don't- it's… don't… don't!" breathless, hopeless. _

_ His face was wrapped in burlap, tied with worm-eaten rope, swollen veins in his hands bulging and squirming over his bones. His hands were warped, glued with sediment to the handle of a bloodstained chainsaw. She'd seen him before and she saw him now, chainsaw slung like a weapon over his shoulder, peering through the tear in his makeshift mask. _

_ He was like a shadow, a transparent, shivering image of a gross ghost: He howled, psychotic, and she screamed- couldn't look away as he threw the blade into his own neck, slicing straight through. One quick motion; he rained blood and sludge, bloody head rolling off, hitting the wall. _

_ She didn't register falling backwards until her head hit the floor- the sound muffled, the lights blurred- world spiraling around her. Lungs filled with swelled cotton, eyes rolling back into her head, black vision._

_ The pen wasn't fast enough to write down all the symptoms of shock - it fell off when the clipboard was placed at an awkward angle. Excella didn't turn to collect it. Her heels almost slid on the floor, but she walked to the woman, past the ghost wall. _

_ She hated Jill Valentine more in that moment than any other. Weak, screaming, pathetic Jill- gagging on her own inflamed throat. Like an animal, drooling, dirty, disgusting. Excella wound up her foot and landed a kick to her ribcage- sharp, letting her own scream._

_ "Get up!"_

_ She pulled out her phone and dialed his number._

_Nails bit into her skin; Excella was on the ground in seconds, back inundated with a smack of cold metal. He answered his phone with a curt "Yes?"that she hardly heard. The experiment stuck fingers in, like a spider- crawling up her leg._

_Wide eyes seeing nothing, bleeding lips begging for a breath, body begging to die, Jill stared without seeing her face, one hand after the other._

_ "Sh-She's gone into shock." _

_ Excella swung her leg, kicking her off; Jill did not get up, Jill did not move: her fingers were stiff and her body was limp. Did he say something? What was his tone?_

_ "G-Get up!"_

_ No orders were followed._

_ "I-I think she's dead."_

_-v-_

_**Delirium-**__ sudden severe confusion and rapid changes in brain function that occur with physical or mental illness._

_Give her Halcion, give her Benzodiazepines, give her Melatonin, give her…_

Jill scratched under the band, compromising her blindfold and shattering her frail barrier from the outside world. The fatigue in her skeleton was weighing her to the steel framed bed: She felt cemented in position.

Her eyes wanted so very much to close, the medication lulling her to sleep - a chemical lullaby. It was the drugs versus the urge to stay awake, to not drop her guard. Jill yawned and absently scratched her wrist before finally falling into a much needed slumber, muscles relaxing and going limp as the chemicals in her blood loosened her, drained her to unconsciousness. Purple bathed skin shivered itself into a faint, and continued to shake.

Trembling in her sleep. Craving it unconsciously, salivating and sweating.

_Halcion… Sedation... Give her painkillers, give her…_

She came back to the waking world, uncertain of how much time had passed- uncertain if _any_ time had passed. She felt cold; her skin was covered in sweat. Her clothing was stuck to her, a bizarre glue of perspiration adhering it to her form.

Ill thoughts flooded her half-conscious mind, muscles clenched, sore, fevered.

Shaking.

P30 was awful, addictive, and cruel. In the early stages it had been syringes and measured amounts, powders and liquids she wasn't given time to understand. Her arms were bruised from the needles, stuck and slit like a pig; no remorse, no pride- not a care in the world if she lived or died. And then came the power; the solid spike of energy, the sheer fury and the uncontrolled madness.

The withdrawals came slowly, steadily. It was like some kind of building sickness, a poison that made you burn until you were sure your skin was crusted and black and your blood was boiling out your mouth, but it was just saliva drenching stone floors. Her body needed the drug - needed it badly.

-v-

_**Relapse: **__to fall or slip back into a former state_

_She paced the swamp-rotten boards, dilapidated and strewn with molds and bugs. A centipede scurried across her path, a hundred or so spindly legs moving quickly. The air at night was yellow and thick, gasses and the scents of moist vegetation and burning torches swirling through the confines of her mask to stain her sense of smell. She wasn't desensitized to the scent of these marshlands: it remained pungent and strange, heavy and choking. _

_Flies and frogs sang merrily, oblivious to the dying village and the monsters now rooting themselves like the feet of the gnarled trees. The calloused and blistered hands of the Sodibaya were beating skin drums and howling war cries from within their huts, over the wooden docks and bridges. Torches were no longer lit: there was no need for fire to see in the dark. _

_Grey wood moaned as she tramped over it, heels clicking, antagonizing to the surroundings. The water beneath the suspended bridge was as thick as oil; she could hardly see the glint of her red lenses in it, or the unnatural color of the African moon. It was a bright, ominous moon that dyed the mists yellow._

_She was here for patrol, the ghost at the skirts of a people built on floating platforms and sickly gray trees. By now she knew the contours of the villages, where the bridges had weakened and where the swamp was most thick. Days, hours, minutes of her robotic life had been spent as an outsider, an observer to a tribe infected with Las Plagas._

_The woman with a crow face appeared when the injections did. They called her "doctor", "Ajuoga", silent creature that never spoke: a bird's face. To them, she was mythical. To herself, she was satanic._

_They were told of a disease that did not exist: Though she did not push the needles into their veins, she stood and watched dozens of people go to die in single file lines. It was a conveyer belt- emotionless, purely for scientific purpose to the administrators, but she watched from her perch, and her emotions boiled. _

_It was blood enough on her bound hands that she couldn't say anything._

_The tribe had died in mere days- an entire isolated culture obliterated off the face of the Earth._

"_Beware the Ajuoga" she wanted to say, but the metal beak had no words of her own and there was no one left to listen. The infected, the Majini men, painted themselves ceremonially with green swamp clay and black tar while the women and children perished. It was a village full of the sounds of the sick and the dying._

_She watched as they fed the remains to the enormous populous of crocodiles, chanting, screaming, drooling in Swahili. Sometimes they feasted on the carcasses of the women and the children themselves, treating diseased viscera as some kind of delicacy. Sometimes they boiled the meat off the bones; sometimes they skinned them there and swallowed strips of it raw._

_She wanted to scream and tell the world what she saw: Bodies slumped and emptied- puddles of drying piss smoldering in the heat- stained floors and revolting smells that made her gag. It wasn't anything uniform, this death wasn't pretty- there was nothing poetic. Women collapsed where they stood after a certain point, and they fell anywhere and everywhere._

_For a while a corpse discarded was typical, lying in unnatural places. Against a door stood a dead woman, a body floated in a trough of rotten feed, and she wanted to shut her eyes completely and pretend for a moment that she wasn't involved. Guilt was something far more powerful than the willpower of a single person._

_And sometimes she thanked Wesker for the ability to pull her red eyes away and continue her patrol of the village. _

_The smell of rotting bodies was now just another spice in the cocktail that was this place, but today, in the dark and mire, she smelled something absolutely rancid. After countless gag-worthy scents, her sense of smell had been all but blown to hell- but this slivered through her head to her brain - it felt like her own personal parasite. _

_The cloak trailed behind her, dragging across the ground and collecting mud, as she stepped to the edge of the docks, the edge of the marsh. Trees hung and bent towards each other, haunted and ancient, their withered branches like malformed hands reaching into a deep dark that the moonlight seemed sucked into._

_She carried on, automatically leading herself around the village outskirts. The huts she strode past were dark, a few containing bodies that had not yet been discovered by the Majini. They were rancid and shoddy caskets for a once proud sort of people._

_Chanting became clearer as she continued about, continued to search for survivors, for anomalies- to watch this tragedy unfold. This bridge took her closer to their center: she could see the red gleam of a fire making the sky bleed. She distanced herself from her body, let her head blank off as she walked closer, under the shadows of reeds and towers. Her footsteps were loud even amongst a chatter of hysterical mantras, screaming war cries and howling like beasts._

_She stopped at the edge of the village, atop a tiny bump in the landscape, to survey._

_The fire burned amongst a massive pile of logs and bones, portal to hell if she'd ever seen one. Around it swam the silhouettes of demons themselves, blurred and circling, dancing, screaming. Her tongue felt swollen with the taste of burning flesh- she became aware of her own breathing, magnified, terrified. This was not a sight meant for her eyes - or for the eyes of any human. A giant stood vigil by the fire, slamming its spear in time with war drums. He was no longer a man, donning a demonic wooden mask adorned with feathers and crusted at the edges with dried blood, forever frozen in an expression of insanity. _

_The woman with the crow face felt her heart race as she watched, the shapes moving and shouting about the fires while others looked on and sputtered saliva-ridden words she couldn't understand. This was enough- she could turn around now and resume her patrol!_

"_Ajuoga."_

_Her body convulsed in repulsion despite the burn in her chest; her feet were planted firmly in the rotten mosses and mud. They were chanting her name. Her skin crawled with a thousand needles as their voices became clearer. Possessed by demons, she stepped forward as if summoned herself. Inside she clawed at her own skin to rip the monster out of her. Stop. Stop… STOP!_

"_AJUOGA!" Someone announced her as her feet took step after step toward the fires. The celebratory noise grew louder, cheering, calling. _

_The Giant howled at her approach: he raised his rotting hands and shook with the sound of bone ornaments and heavy bangles. The Majini squabbled as they continued to dance; some of them pulled her in with snarls and hisses, their necrotizing fingers leaving bits of sticking flesh on her cowl. She closed her eyes and let out a sound that defied the drug in her veins - a scream of something unnatural that bounced off the metal of the mask._

_Demons swarmed over her, with her- her chest was burning, probably pulsing blood out of the holes screwed between her ribs. The Ajugoa screamed in harmonics, horrifying, powerful, as the Majini danced with her, swaying around a hellish fire. The bird woman screamed for the world, for the inhumanity, for her pain, for the unfortunate, and the tribe was pleased, amazed at the way she moved and clawed the air with her hands, how her birdlike feet clawed the earth and left wounds._

_She was a goddess of death. _

_The Giant howled and the drums beat faster, she danced faster- her body fevered with the pain of disobedience, her throat tight and her lungs collapsing in on themselves. Her organs would fail her; he could stop her heart dead without being present should she disobey him, should she betray him._

_And yet she was raising her heeled feet with the infected and screeching, one of them, one of no one._

"_AJUGOA- AJUGOA-!" _

_Her cowl slithered behind her as she pulled her arms out of the sleeves and rose scale-patterned hands into a hopeless spin. Her arms were ones of crocodiles, of snakes. Her face of a bird, her body of a woman. The tribe screamed louder and danced to keep up with her, frenzied dark bodies, flesh falling to the ground as they moved- leprosy of a parasitic kind. Their feet pounded the earth as they leapt around her, demons all of the same origin._

_Why did she dance?_

_To defy? _

_**No.**_

_To die? _

_**With hope to die as she should.**_

_She let her fingers rake the smoke-stained night, yellow and sick, forced herself to disobey, to dance- to rot. The drug leeched on her insides and boiled them individually, her body burned in ways impossible- lungs tightened, head spinning. She felt sick so suddenly- felt like she was going to pass out from the precipitous pounding in her skull. The bird-faced woman gripped her metal head and howled, fleeing the witch fires as her chest threatened to explode, the wires threaded through her ribs squirming, shocking. _

_She couldn't die under him easily, poetically. _

_The infected howled and bawled and shouted for her to come back, screaming- always screaming._

"_AJUGOA-"_

_She fled the fire, spit dripping from her sore lips and feet wobbling in her boots so thick with sweat that the soles slid. She wanted to run right out of her skin, that bird woman- she screamed and leapt beyond the boundaries of the wooden docks, the bridges and rotting thatched huts, to the trees and the swamps where the light was clawed open and ripped from the sky by gnarled branches. She heard the howling of the infected behind her and she swallowed her beating heart, but it wouldn't go down._

_The suit was on fire – no, her skin was on fire: She felt blood pour from her guts; invisible craters formed in her head as the P30 shocks worsened. Her body convulsed as she ran; she was blind as her boots sank into thick mulch, felt the roots of trees under the sludge like tumors. _

_It became impossible to run so she waded through mud as quickly as possible, not thinking about the danger if she were to step in a hole or if the bottom should suddenly disappear. _

_The cries were her shadow- and thus she ran faster, deeper, scraps of moon her only companion. Something dribbled gracelessly from her lips, a result of the cataclysm racking her organs, cracking them open._

_The bottom of the swamp dissolved in her next step, and she yelped and fell into thinner waters. Her hand grabbed the edge of something barely illuminated. It felt moist and cracked, wood. She gagged on swamp moss and threw her other hand up, clawing at the soggy remains of a dock. Her cloak felt like deadweight, an entire separate body clinging to her as she fell back, heaving and vomiting the sludge out of her stomach, the mask ripped from her face and thrown into the dark. _

_The woman under the metal face gagged on bile, every spasm felt twice fold, the drug that had melted her down filling her stomach with all kinds of god-knows what. _

_Her eyes watered, she shook and listened as her stomach collapsed into a small ball, the Majini voices were fading, and with them, her orders had changed. _

"_Stay alive."_

_He hissed that phrase- his final command to her, the one to resort to in emergency situations. The device was calming down, ticking less. She wouldn't melt in her own body._

_ The woman bowed her head and gathered her balance, the convulsions subsiding. Slivers of moon were hardly any help, but she tried to see anyway. _

_ Nothing but the twisted silhouettes of diseased mangroves, poisoned with oil runoff, rotting from the inside out. _

_ Her orders in this situation were to wait for him, stay and wait, and he will come to collect her after a period of twelve hours. She took a meditative breath and felt carefully for the edge of the platform. Instead she tapped against something solid and with some kind of viscosity. She couldn't see what it was. _

_ She screamed when whatever it was shot out and grabbed her foot. She tumbled back and fell- it felt like she was falling into the color black, into nothing behind her. She didn't hit the dock, she kept going, something attached to her, another thing, solid and alive, digging its claws into her ankle. Her spine hit a bottom hard, a bed of slime covered tree roots and mud walls._

_ A trap set for animals to fall into._

_ She kicked at the solid thing on her leg, but its unseen hand bit harder into her ankle, pierced the fabric of her cowl and suit, and dug into flesh like needles. It crawled over her in the tiny grave; she felt things crawl upon her drenched skin between bunches of the fabric. She flailed, kicked at the demon, felt her foot punch a hole with a squelch and a crack into it, smelled a wave of putrid decay following it. Chunks of sightless rot spilled over her foot, pieces of spatter decorated her face and lips. She screamed again and kicked harder, tried to throw it off, slammed it against the wall. _

_ Rotten hair and feathers brushed her face, and she drew back a punch and threw._

_ She was hoarse when she felt skull fragments and maggots slipping through her fist._

**Twelve hours**

_The sun was pale and dim at noontime, as the master resolved to search for his pet. A man who wore the scales of a black snake seemed to ghost through the skirts of the Sodibaya docks, in search for something. He was undisputed: they sensed his blood - he was something greater than them, and thus they did not stray near this strange envoy. _

_Albert Wesker followed his senses, the pull to find her. He felt her presence like a splinter, always there and bothersome if agitated. After so much effort to be put into a biological weapon, his personal trophy and extended will, there really wasn't any excuse for misplacing her. She was his possession, one of his most prized little creations, lost in the mire._

_The disgust at that thought was etched into his brow as he slid over thick roots and skeleton walkways, looking for her. The insects in the air made his head swim with the buzzing; he smelled carrion, muck, and __**her**__._

"_Jill." He tried, hissing it over the swamp. _

_Something answered in a shriek, like it was held back for too long._

_He was at the edge of a hole looking down and he saw her, the color of liquefied chalk and the recently dead, her body entwined with the corpse of a rotted creature, by the head-dress, a medicine man, a witch doctor. Maggots had sputtered out, the body was so rotten is was mostly in liquids and barely attached chunks._

_He reached down for her hand and she jumped and clung to it, desperate, petrified. Worms and beetles slid off of her. He stared, backed away and set his jaw; turned away as she took one breath and literally collapsed, body falling gracelessly into the water with a smack. He growled and pulled her out by her heel._

"_Jill-" A snarl._

"_JILL-" A roar._

_She flinched and shook and tried to compose herself but she couldn't. Everything was shaking, she was unfocused._

"_Jill, focus on me- now!"_

_Her eyes snapped to him by order, but she continued to shake. He grabbed her jaw, pressed in indents that would bruise._

"_Incompetence will not be tolerated, Jill."_

"_Yes." She said, her throat creaking like nails on a chalkboard- the same sound, the same cringe under his skin. Her skin smelled: everything about her smelled disgusting. _

_He grimaced and turned._

"_Go clean yourself- now."_

_She left. Her feet took her- her head blanket._

_She felt maggots crawling under her skin._

_-v-_

Jill bolted upright, eyes wild as she clutched at her chest: carefully sutured wounds throbbed and burned. Her skin had cracked under thick clumps of cotton bandages, staining it pink in some places. The tape that had been holding the dressings in place had been rendered useless- her body's excretions effectively nullified the adhesive. She hastily removed the tainted gauze in an effort to provide some sort of relief from the discomfort surrounding it and immediately panicked.

Her second heart, her prison, the P30 dispenser – gone! In place of the familiar device was bruised flesh: purples and blues and blacks mingled with spider-web veins and ugly black stitches. Her ribs rattled and her head spun with the effort to recall what exactly had happened- what was going on. The last few hours – no, the last few days – were a fragmented mess of monsters and pain.

She couldn't think, couldn't focus - and the blinding white of her surroundings was not helping. She threw the gauze on the floor and held her head, feeling as though a bomb had gone off inside of her skull. Her hands shook violently as she impulsively scratched her wrist to stave off the plastic that now hugged it tightly. Her fingernails brushed the identification band aside, revealing a series of unseemly bumps and blotched skin that spread up and down her entire forearm. Momentarily taken aback by the sight, she continued to scratch her arm in an effort to make the itching subside.

Up and down, up and down: she repeated the motion with increased urgency, even as the delicate skin broke and bled under her nails. Bright red trails decorated her arms like war paint, but she didn't care - that damn itching had to stop!

She shut her eyes, trying to make sense of her spotty memories and her body's uncontrollable craving for a drug that she despised.

The whirring sounds of the air scrubbers stopped her dead: for a brief, mad moment, she thought she heard _him_ – hissing her name, mocking her in her weakened state. It would fit, a machine-like hiss peeling from his mirthless lips.

Yes… he was there- hell, he was _there_, in the air and in the walls and in her head. She heard his voice like needles in her skin, so familiar and so destructive. No coherence, just the tone- that's all she heard: the hiss, the tenor exploding in her ears. Cruel madman, possessive bastard, heuristic hellion, always there even when he was dead.

He was laughing at her meaningless escapes - she could hear it in his voice.

Jill sprung off of the small bed and backed herself against a wall, her bloodied arm leaving harsh stains, tiny blotches- but they were so horrifyingly red!- on the white. White walls, his hiss; her head throbbed as her body shook too quickly to register.

The thought of him and everything he had done, everything she'd been a part of, made her nauseous. Her head wandered off her shoulders, swam through visions of being bolted to metal examination tables while he stood over her and spoke with that despicable smile in his voice. His fingers felt like insect feet- long, disgusting, slithering up her body, slithering in her skin even after death.

She felt them now, all over her shoulders, heard the sigh that made her sick: she felt her skin crawl as bile rose in the back of her throat.

Unable to hold it back she fell to her hands and knees and vomited, letting out a horrified gurgle as she looked down to see something other than water and mucus seep out of her. Yellow polyps, the length of her finger, sticky and coated with sick, she stared, petrified when one squirmed.

Out of this puddle, writhing around, swam maggots- fat things, engorged and helpless: the smell of disease and decay pouring off of them. There was nothing in her stomach but wriggling carrion crawlers- she knew it now.

Jill let out a strangled cry before moving away as fast as she could, backing herself against the opposite wall, chapped lips coated with acid. She was all rotten inside; she could taste it - she could _feel_ the worms crawl under her skin. It wasn't real though - it couldn't be real! She was seeing things - hallucinations!

"Not real, not real, oh god- " Jill told herself frantically. She repeated the lifeless mantra over and over, her voice hoarse, tears streaming down her flushed face. Fists found her hair, pulled the roots right out with tugs. She stared at the puddle, the maggots.

"It's not REAL!"

A distant noise interrupted her chanting; somebody was coming - _they_ were coming - to poke, prod, and dissect her once more. They'd pull out worms and they'd know she was dead; they'd rip her apart and they'd shove her in another horrible box! He hissed through the air- she heard his displeasure and the clack of a mortuary locker.

She'd be there alive, frozen for testing, the worms in her gut eating their way through. Trapped in a box forever.

She searched desperately for a way to defend herself: there was no way in hell she was going to let them take her again- she needed help! Positioning herself behind the door and shaking uncontrollably, she desperately tried to form some sort of strategy: She could tear off her wristband and give her assailant a vicious paper cut, but that wouldn't do; her options were severely limited. She swallowed hard as she felt something squirm in her throat.

Sounds were miles louder: A beep near the door, the hiss of the scrubbers (or was that his voice?). The door opened with a clunk, an unsuspecting orderly cautiously peering in. White outfit, sterile gloves, sterile lab jacket, bubbled arachnid eyes framed by thick goggles. She knew his intent. He rose his hands- chanting a soft, "Easy, easy"- words lost on her ears. Sick- she was sick and she showed it- and they wanted the parasite inside of her. Worms, maggots- rotten guts.

It was one slipshod motion, dashing and grabbing the man from behind, fingers around his neck, knee to his back. Just like she was taught, nails to the right places, pressure in the soft spots. Pressing in waves, harder with every breath he tried to take and couldn't. He was unconscious before he knew what hit him. Jill let him fall gracelessly with a thick plop, crouched beside him, holding her stomach, clutching it, aching.

"Hey- ! Shit… Paul-?"

Another orderly: blurry, white outfit, white mask- taller than the first, accompanied by more of them- _all_of them? Flooding in, caging her in, she hissed, bared her teeth. Trapped for enough of her life, bound to a rotting body- they wouldn't take her alive! He could laugh in her ear all he wanted!

She howled and launched herself at the closest one, a bullet with a mouth of blood. Hands flew, one doctor under her, her nails at his throat, feeling the vibrations of every dying gasp- a vice grip. Other hands tangled fingers around her body, yanked at her shoulders and tried desperately to get her off. Hands clawed at her and she screamed, whipped around, lashed in every direction. A kick with a rotation, her elbow to someone's nose so hard the bone crunched on impact. The lackeys shouted things that blurred into the white walls- medical terms mixed with panicked obscenities.

A tight-boned nurse rushed her, intent on injecting her with a sedative, but he was far too slow: she quickly disarmed him, breaking his wrist- one brutal snap and the syringe was in her palm, cold, sick.

He screamed when she jammed it into his eye, the others watching in horror as his blood stained her hands, spurted from the hollow point into the socket- one makeshift lobotomy. Something crunched underneath and she hissed as his blood spattered on her teeth, metallic taste.

His screams rang in their ears as she kicked him aside and pounced on the next staff-member- scrambling like an ant, terrified. Yelling for help, calling security. The worms inside her rolled and tumbled, a rotten pile in her gut. She shrieked at the listless white garb- inhuman little soldiers.

A quick blow to the sternum knocked him back, her heel to his chest. Executed with flawless precision, the death blows of a killing machine, beautiful, horrific. _A weapon capable of destruction on a phenomenal scale._ She heard his cold, analytical tongue along the recesses of her skull, felt his sick charisma drip into her ears and linger.

Her psychosis screamed for freedom.

She spotted a pen sticking out of that poor man's front pocket and snatched it without hesitation. Anything was a weapon in her hands: she jammed it straight into his jugular, twisting it to make sure it went in.

White, red… She clutched her head; screamed when the prick of something hit her with the force of a bullet, straight in her thigh. She heard worms bawling in agony, she felt them try to escape through her skin, shrieked as their bodies made her forearms ripple. The world shivered once, shapes blurred. She heard screaming and shouting, orders, medical terms, all five thousand miles away.

She was unconscious before she saw them crawl out, his sigh of disappointment fresh and brutal.

-v-

Christopher Redfield had spent the better part of two days fighting for his life out in the harsh African heat and it showed. Regulation exhaustion came with the territory, it was almost required: sunken eyes streaked with veins. The bags under them, coupled with the ratty stubble across his face made him look much older than he really was, marked him as a soldier and a survivor. You never sleep easy when you're a survivor: he knew this too well now.

Running a bandaged hand through his disheveled hair, he turned to the person next to him, a small wiry medical technician. Pale, clammy, scared shitless by this incident, no doubt. Maybe she was a rookie, maybe she was new.

He drew a breath and asked, "Sit rep?"

Not that he particularly needed one – he had already watched the surveillance footage, struck dumb at the grisly images that had played out before him. Nevertheless, it was time for an update. And maybe some gin, depending on the news. After that nervous little look she gave him, and the snap of those clammy white gloves, that gin didn't seem like such a "maybe".

"Well, we – we managed to sedate her, but she single-handedly took down about half of our staff, sir. She's stabilizing physically, but she's still extremely…"

"Extremely _what?" _Chris couldn't help but to snap at the mousy technician; he had no need for anything to be sugar-coated for him – especially not when it came to this.

"…Agitated."

The single word was sobering and also a huge understatement. He felt the age old snag of his temper prod at him, dulled after being whittled on long years and far too many disasters to see in a lifetime.

"She looks a little more than _agitated_."

From the other side of the one way mirror, Jill Valentine sat alone, hands bound, feet bound, knees touching her lips. Her countenance said nothing, a blank, medicated stare at the wall, waiting for her condemnation.

"Jill…" he murmured, but her name was a faraway thing that didn't even seem very real. Staring at her now, through a glass window, looking down the hall to the elevator doors, lined with caution tape, she'd said it before: She was a murderer, not a hero.

He wanted to unsee it and paint her with a star on her heart and a halo on her head - take her somewhere far away. They wanted him to see this- that omnipresent "they" of the superior authority. And, as much as he hated to admit it, he _needed_ to see this or it wouldn't feel true.

It still didn't.

They both started the moment she moved her head, her eyes focused on the mirror, black, purple, coated. Sunken hallows in her face. She was staring right at him with dark, dark eyes; Body sick in so little time.

She stared on at her reflection, numb, and a sigh poured from her lips, wriggling, making the observers sick with anxiety.

"_Ajuoga."_

They exchanged a look, confused.

"What the hell does that mean?" he said. The girl had no answer to that; he couldn't be expected to be surprised.

Jill sat in her mind, beside a burning fire, shadows dancing about her. She closed her eyes, letting them swim over her skin, swallow her. She slithered into the memory and felt her body slacken.


End file.
